Once, Judd would’ve answered with a yes or a no. That was before he fell in love with a woman who saw no evil in him. “There’s nothing to fix. What I can do is teach you to control it. So you can use it for good things.”
“Like what?”
“Like putting broken bodies back together.”
He saw the boy consider that, his teddy bear clutched tight to his heart. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Actually,” Judd said. “It’s better than that—it’s pretty damn good.”
A shaky smile. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. So, you ready for your first lesson?”
CHAPTER 50
Dev woke to the insistent beeping of his phone at two a.m. on the day they planned to corner Ming, very aware of Katya cuddled against him. Only when he felt her breathe did his heart settle into a steady rhythm.
Turning to the screen of the small comm unit on his bedside table, he flicked it on to find Jack’s shaken face looking at him. “Dev, William’s sitting here eating chocolate crunch cereal.”
Dev shifted his brain into gear. “Weird time for it, but that’s still good news, so why do you look like you saw a ghost?”
Shoving a trembling hand through his hair, Jack said, “Because my son tells me an Arrow came to see him tonight and started teaching him how to be good.”
“Damn”—Dev whistled softly through his teeth—“she came through.”
Jack wasn’t listening, his attention fixed on something to his right. “I’ll be there in a second, sweetheart.” Returning his attention to Dev, Jack shook his head. “Melissa’s just sitting there, petting his hair like she’s afraid he’s going to disappear. But he keeps on smiling.”
“The Arrow isn’t a threat to William,” Dev said, knowing Ashaya Aleine would never harm another mother’s son. “I have a feeling he has to worry about his own name getting out—that’s probably why the night visit.”
“I don’t care if he wants to visit at three in the fucking morning if he can do this for my son.” A shaky laugh. “I’ll do whatever the man wants. All you have to do is tell me.”
Three hours later, Dev called Jack back. “He wants you to move to San Francisco.” The information had been relayed through Dorian.
“Man’s got family to protect,” Dorian had said. “Less people who know what he can do the better. I didn’t even know before he decided to tell me today.”
Dev raised an eyebrow. “This guy sounds secretive.”
“I’d have him at my back anytime.” A steady gaze. “He’s determined to help that kid—determined enough to share a secret he’s kept for a hell of a long time, so if I was you, I’d do exactly as he says.”
Now Jack didn’t hesitate for even a second. “I’ll start packing.”
Hanging up, Dev met the eyes of the woman who’d just exited the bathroom. “Come to bed.”
She didn’t argue, but as she walked across the room, he saw something that made his spine knot. “Your balance is off.”
“Yes.” Sliding into the bed, she ran her fingers down the roughness of his jaw. “But I don’t want to talk about that right now. Love me, Dev.”
And because he could deny her nothing, he did as she asked.
If Dev had allowed himself to acknowledge the enraged helplessness that twisted around his mind in a thousand coils, he might’ve done something stupid. As it was, he compartmentalized. It was a skill he’d gotten very good at as a child. The machines, the metal, usually helped, but never when it came to Katya. She reached too deep, made him feel too much.
“I didn’t think the non-Silent could do that,” Katya said to him that evening as they discussed the final preparations. A bare two hours remained. Dev would’ve preferred a longer lead-up, but not only would Ming be in the city today, but the longer they waited, the more Katya would lose of herself.
“Do what?” he asked, looking up from his sketch of the location where they planned to lure the bastard.
“Shut away emotional responses.” Rising from her seat on the sofa in front of him, she walked over to sit on the arm of his chair. “You’ve gone cold.”
His slid his own arm around her waist in an instinctively protective gesture. “It’s necessary.” Tugging gently, he brought her into his embrace. “A soldier can’t operate unless he’s completely focused on the target.”
“How long were you a soldier?”
“Few years after high school.” He frowned and annotated a gap in the net of snipers he planned to have cover the meeting spot. “I decided it’d be the easiest way to get the kind of training I needed.”
“Needed for what?” A warm hand along his nape, a kiss pressed to his cheekbone.
“Katya.” It was meant to be an admonishment, but he was lost the instant he met those hazel eyes. Groaning, he pulled her down with a hand on the back of her head and bit at her lower lip in sensual punishment. “I know what you’re trying to do.”
Her gaze darkened to jade shot with tiger’s-eye. “Let me.”
“I can’t.”
It took her long minutes to release a sigh. “I don’t want to lose you.”
He looked at her, waiting for her to understand.
“No,” she said after almost thirty seconds of silence. “I wouldn’t choose safety either if it was you.”
He kissed her for that, for accepting his need to protect her, keep her safe.
Afterward, she nuzzled into his throat. “Just a few minutes.”
“Just a few.” He needed to have every piece in its absolute accurate place or it would all turn to shit. If they worked it exactly right, the Councilor would find a physical meeting more expedient than a psychic one. Because a meeting on the psychic plane would leave Katya ultimately vulnerable—Dev was sure Ming had a hidden back door into her mind, one that would allow him to easily skirt the shields he’d put in place and take anything he wanted.
“Is it all from being a soldier? Your ability to compartmentalize?”
Shadows whispered at the back of his mind, voracious and grasping. He fought their attempts to drag him back into the grief-shrouded past. “Why?”
“There’s a sense about you ... as if the need for control is ingrained into your soul.”
“One way to put it.” Releasing a slow breath, he ran his hand over her hair. “I told you my father killed my mother. What I didn’t tell you is that I witnessed the murder.” He kept his voice even, his words clear. That emotional stranglehold was the only weapon he had to fight the shadows’ insidious taunts.
“Oh, Dev.” A soft whisper, his pain echoed in her voice. “How old were you?”
“Old enough to understand that my father shouldn’t have his hands around my mother’s neck like that but not old enough to pull him off.” The memory haunted him every day of his life. If only he’d been stronger. But he’d been a slight boy of barely nine, his father a big man who outweighed him four times over. “He probably would’ve killed me, too, except that my mother managed to broadcast a telepathic scream for help.”
He could still hear the jagged shock of the door being broken open, the stamp of booted feet, shouting, then people thumping fists onto his mother’s chest and breathing into her mouth. Her chest had begun to rise and fall, feeding his hope ... until he’d realized that she wasn’t doing it on her own, that she wasn’t really breathing.
“It took the rescuers ten minutes to realize I was in the room.” He’d been thrown into a corner by his father’s back-hand, had lain there dazed and bleeding as his world shattered in front of him. “I saw them drag my screaming, crying father from the room. Then I saw them pronounce my mother dead.”
Katya’s kiss was a benediction against his forehead. “Honed in fire,” she murmured. “Did your father suffer a psychotic episode?”
“Yes. And he never really came back. He spends almost all of his time in a room in a facility in Pennsylvania. It’s a nice place, lots of gardens, trees, real peaceful, but he only ever leaves his room when he’s forced
to, or if I visit.”
“Do you visit him often?”
“No.” He closed his hand around her hip, his grip tight. “The adult in me, the reasoned being, understands that he didn’t do what he did out of choice. So I go. But then I see him, and I’m that child again, watching him snuff out my mother’s life. And I can’t go that last step—I can’t forgive him.”
“At leas—” Katya began, just as Dev’s watch beeped.
“This can wait,” he said, shamefully relieved. “It’s time.”
Forty-five minutes later found them sitting in a car outside a row of storage lockers located on the eastern edge of Queens, Katya at the wheel. Dev had chosen the location for two very important reasons—one, it was out of the way, lessening the chances of interruption, and two, it gave the snipers an excellent line of sight.
“Okay,” he said, checking his phone. “The business association dinner’s about to wind up. He’ll be on the road within the next ten minutes. Surveillance confirms the teleporter isn’t with him—this is our best shot.”
Rubbing her hands on her thighs, Katya looked at him. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You have to, baby. If he decides to utilize a back door into your mind, he needs to see what he expects.” Reaching over, he pulled her out of her seat and into his lap. “Hopefully, his arrogance will have him accepting everything at face value.”
“I don’t want to share this with him.” She put her hands on his face. “I don’t want him to know how much you matter.”
“He won’t,” Dev whispered, the gold in his eyes electric in the hushed dark inside the car. “He has no comprehension of what it is to feel this much for someone.” He brushed her hair off her face.
She had no defenses against him. So she leaned forward and took his mouth in a soft, sweet kiss. Tenderness and pain ravaged her in equal measures as he put his arms around her. Taking the taste of him inside her mouth, she allowed him to seize the lead, to kiss her as if he’d never get enough.
Fire licked up her spine, passion rising even in the midst of chaos. When his hands slipped under her sweatshirt to move up her back, she shivered. Focusing only on the sensations, on the heat he could stoke so easily, she moaned in the back of her throat and moved her hand to his neck, playing her fingers over his pulse.
He nipped at her mouth, his own hands sweeping around to cup her breasts. Hunger rocked through her, but it was then, while he was distracted, that she dropped the pressure injector hidden in the sleeve of her sweatshirt into her palm. “I’m sorry, Dev.” Pressing the injector to the pulse in his neck, she pushed the trigger.
His body jerked. Breaking the kiss, he stared at her. “Katya?” Betrayal snuffed out the gold and an instant later, his head slumped back on the seat.
CHAPTER 51
Swallowing tears, Katya picked up his cell phone and input a number she’d found embedded in her memory.
Ming’s voice was an ice-cold blade at the other end. “Councilor LeBon.”
“I have him,” she whispered, letting her desperation, her fear, her anguish flood her mind.
A pause. “This is unexpected.” The crawling brush of fingers slithering over her mind. “A double cross, Ekaterina? I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”
Nausea roiled as those fingers probed and violated. “I want to live.” She kept her thoughts mired in the torment she’d felt the instant Dev understood what she’d done. “You promised you’d release me if I delivered Devraj Santos.”
“I ordered you to kill him.”
“I thought you’d prefer him alive if you could get him that way.” The fingers retreated from her mind, but she didn’t breathe a sigh of relief.
“True.” Another pause. “Where are you?”
She gave him the coordinates. “There are sharpshooters waiting for you.”
“I see that. Since I’m without a teleporter at the moment, I’ll drive to you. Wait for further instructions.”
Hanging up, Katya dropped her forehead to Dev’s, wanting to sob but knowing she couldn’t indulge the need. Instead, she shifted back into the driver’s seat and took a deep breath, feeling her chest muscles strain against the pressure. Her fingers trembled on the steering wheel, but it wasn’t from fear. She was losing more and more pieces of her body, her self.
The cell phone rang seven minutes later.
“Drive out of your current location,” Ming told her. “There’s an empty lot ten blocks to the left.”
“I’m on my way.” Closing the phone, she started up the engine and headed out into the late evening darkness. Dev’s phone rang almost immediately. She knew it was his team, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
She snapped the phone open. “Change of plans,” she said to Aubry. “We’ve been directed to another meeting point.”
“Where? I need to get my men to—”
She gave him the coordinates to a location ten minutes from the correct one. “Hurry.”
“Give the phone to Dev.”
Knowing the other man would never believe anything else she said, Katya hung up. And drove like a bat out of hell, certain Aubry and his people wouldn’t be able to get to their vehicles fast enough to follow her.
She screeched into the empty lot behind a huge warehouse less than five minutes later. Ming’s dark sedan was waiting for her, the windows opaque. Bringing her car to a stop beside it, she got out, her left leg shaky but still capable of keeping her upright. And her fingers ... they were strong enough to complete this.
The back window lowered to reveal Ming’s face. “I have to admit,” the Councilor said, “given what I glimpsed in your memories, I would have expected you to have turned traitor.”
“I want to live.” Repeating her earlier words, she folded her arms as Ming’s driver/bodyguard got out—pinning her with a cool stare from the other side of the car.
“Your memories didn’t come back early enough,” Ming mused, looking at her as if she were an experiment. “Unfortunate that you were handicapped for such an extended period. The amnesia was only meant to give you a cover long enough for them to trust you.”
She ignored his words. “You said you’d be able to fix me.”
Ming leaned back in his seat. “You’ve left it too late. There’s no way to repair the damage.”
“Stop it advancing then.”
Ming spoke to the driver. “Get the Shine director.”
As the Arrow—and the driver was unquestionably part of the Council’s most lethal private army—came around the front of Ming’s sedan, Katya said, “Stop.”
Of course he didn’t. She turned to Ming, feeling the hairs on the back of her neck rise as the Arrow reached Dev’s side of the vehicle. “You lied, didn’t you?” she asked, letting him hear her anger. “You were never going to be able to undo what you did to me. The shield is unbreakable.”
“Yes, and as the lines of programming are linked directly to it—ah, you didn’t know that.”
“I was dead the moment you took me.”
“You did well, Ekaterina.” Pincers closing around her brain. “If I’d known you’d prove this useful, I wouldn’t have anchored the shield in your brain, but what’s done is done.”
And now, she thought, hearing the Arrow push back Dev’s door, it was time for her to die. “You know, Ming,” she said, as a line of wet trickled out of her ear, as her left leg began to spasm, “I’m really not as stupid as you think.” Bringing out the sleek little gun hidden in her lower back, she shot him in the head.
A solid thump sounded from behind her... the impact of a body hitting the ground.
Blood covered her, having spurted through Ming’s open window, but her attention was elsewhere. “Dev?”
“He’s down. Stunned.” Getting out of the passenger seat, Dev ran to her. “Damn it to hell, Katya, he could’ve—”
She shook her head, dropping her gun hand to her side. “No. Part of me always knew it had to be a lie. You can’t undo a trap that
severe.”
Something flickered on the other side of Ming’s vehicle.
“Get in the car!” Shoving her inside, Dev crashed in behind her. As he spun them out of the lot and away, the car reacting unbelievably fast, she turned to look.
Ming’s car had somehow collapsed inward, as if someone had crumpled the frame like so much paper. “Dev?” she whispered.
“Turns out that frame had some metal in it” was his cryptic answer. “How many men teleported in?”
“Four.” She could see them silhouetted against the New York skyline. All were wearing the unrelieved black of the Arrow Squad. The fact that they were still at Ming’s vehicle as Dev’s car disappeared around the corner made her jaw tighten. “Ming’s not dead.”
Dev hung up the phone, meeting Katya’s eyes as she sat on their bed, her arms locked around raised knees. “You’re right, the bastard survived.” DarkRiver’s Psy contact had come through again. It made Dev wonder how high up in the superstructure that contact was, but he wasn’t idiotic enough to jeopardize the man’s cover by asking too many questions.
“I shot him in the head.”
“He has the devil’s luck.” Climbing onto the bed, he sat with his legs bracketing her, his hands cupping her face. “The bullet blasted through and straight out the other side, along the very top of his skull. He’s unconscious but predictions are he’ll make a full recovery.”
“Will it all come back on you? On Shine?”
“No, baby.” He moved his body closer around hers, hating to see her like this, so quiet, so shattered. “This is simply another chapter in a war we’ve been fighting since my ancestors dropped from the Net. It’s just out in the open now.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Yes.” He could still remember the sheer panic he’d felt at being trapped in the car while she stood so close to Ming. “You weren’t supposed to actually knock me out.” The dose had been small—he’d started to come out of it even as they peeled out of the first meeting spot, but the injector had been meant to be empty.
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